Archive for 2009

Related to the recent MediaWiki Update, we currently encounter some issues with the openSUSE Wiki and we’d like to make you aware of it. Wiki Senior Rajko M. posted an official statement at the opensuse-wiki ML and we’d like to forward it to News.o.o to reach out to a broader audience. As you can see, the current issues are known to the Wiki team and we’re working hard on resolving them.

Of course Mediawiki software update from version 1.5 that is couple of years
old to the recent 1.15 is bound to have a problems as our customizations in
layout and structure doesn’t work well in all details, or are not available
right now.

In earlier email Remy listed bugs that we are aware of and thewebmaster@opensuse.org is notified about problems. Here is the reordered list
from Remy’s email with comments:

1) The namespace SBD:SBD has disappeared. No more support database ..

Don’t panic, the articles are in a database. It is just that SDB namespace is
not configured and Mediawiki software has no idea how to access articles. Once
it will be added again all articles will appear in their places.

Note: Do not recreate articles on your own.
Once SDB is recreated any article that will be created now will disappear with
all changes that you made. The Mediawiki can handle only one title SDB:Article
and that is either normal article with colon in the title, or article that
belongs to namespace SDB, and colon has special meaning as namespace
delimiter. Both can be in database, but only one can be presented to the web
page viewer.

2) The internal relative links [[/subpage]] are now broken. Only
absolute links [[page/subpage]] are allowed.

The subpages is additional functionality not in default Mediawiki
configuration and it doesn’t work right now.

3) The <iimg></iimg> tag isn’t interpreted anymore. I am not sure if
there is a way to fix this, or if we should avoid using it in the
future.

4)The [edit] button is now on the left, next to the title
sections/subsections. It makes the headings difficult to read.
– There are now 2 horizontal lines on the bottom of each page, between
the Categories and the end of the articles.

5) The “Recent changes” link in the Toolbox isn’t working anymore.

6) It is now impossible to upload file on the wiki with error:
Internal error – The upload directory (public) is not writable by the web
server.

This one is server access problem, and it is up to the webmaster to solve it.

Over the last two weeks, we have been making some major infrastructure changes to the openSUSE landing page and wikis.Â The result is that users of the wiki can now expect new features, better language support, and a considerable increase in performance.Â Here is a quick overview of some changes that we have made:

Wiki software upgraded to the latest version of MediaWiki (upgraded from version 1.5!)

Moved wiki and main site onto new and much more powerful servers

Implemented PHP bytecode caching through APC

Increased use of memcached

Our testing indicates that the new wiki software, along with the use of APC and memcached, results in 2 to 3 times the performance on the same hardware.Â Users can also expect the enhanced security and features of the newest versions of MediaWiki.

Next week, we plan on moving the SUSE blogs onto new hardware and implement APC caching with them as well.Â Testing indicates that users should expect an even more drastic performance increase with the blogs.

Of course, major changes often result in some issues.Â If you become aware of any problems with the new wiki software, please send a message to webmaster@opensuse.org.

In the past, we had one central openSUSE subversion (svn) repository on Novell Forge for the openSUSE infrastructure including the openSUSE Build Service. This repository has grown over time.Â We’ have now split the repository in some smaller projects and some repositories are now using git.

The git repositories are publicly available at gitorious.org via http://www.gitorious.org/opensuse/. Besides the Build Service and openSUSE infrastructure projects, you find at gitorious also other projects used in the openSUSE distribution, e.g. the SuSEfirewall2 project or the openSUSE kernel repository.

For the current 2009 election of the openSUSE board, we have three seats for election and three candidates running unopposed. As our existing election rules did not anticipate this scenario, the Election Committee has made the following decision:

The seats up for election include one Novell-employed position and two non-Novell-employed positions. Pavol Rusnak is running for the Novell-employed seat and Rupert HorstkÃ¶tter and Bryen M Yunashko are running for the non-Novell seats.

The election committee will declare the candidates as elected by end of Monday, 7th of December, if nobody else steps up in the respective group to run for the election. Otherwise we will have an election in that group.

This means that if further candidates for the non-Novell seats declare candidacy, we will do an election for these two seats – and if further candidates for the Novell seat step up, we run an election for that one seat – and if candidates for both step up, we elect all seats.

So, here’s the final call: If you’re happy with the three candidates, thank them – and if not, step up and declare your candidacy by announcing it on opensuse-project@opensuse.org and election-officials@opensuse.org. You can find more information on candidacy and the election in general here.

The Election committee is also open for comments on the election before the December 7th deadline when the Election Committee will declare and certify the winners.

We’d like to thank Bryen, Rupert and Pavol for stepping up and volunteering to serve on the openSUSE board. For next election the election committee will adapt the rules to cover cases like this one.

The openSUSE Wiki Team Meeting will take place on Sunday, the 6th of December 2009 at 19.00 UTC. See all time zones on the Fixed Time World Clock. The meeting will be held in IRC on the #opensuse-wiki channel on Freenode.

This is our last Team Meeting discussing the Wiki Usability Concept before we actually start the transition to the new Wiki instance. Everyone interested is certainly welcome to join us. The agenda (working draft) is available here.

Not familiar with IRC? A good overview can be found at irchelp.org. This site is not affiliated with openSUSE.

The next openSUSE Project meeting will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, December 2nd, at 12:00 UTC. The meeting time in all time zones are listed on the Fixed Time World Clock. Project meetings are always held in the #opensuse-project channel on Freenode.

Please add topics as soon as possible. Also, if you have questions for the meeting, but can’t attend (we know that the meeting times can’t work for everyone) please add them to the agenda as well. We also take live questions, of course. Logs of the meeting are posted to the wiki here:

Not familiar with IRC? A good overview can be found at irchelp.org. This site is not affiliated with openSUSE. For more information on Freenode, see http://freenode.net/. Alternatively, you can log into the IRC meeting via a Web-based interface at webchat.freenode.net.

As always, we meet in #opensuse-project on Freenode. Fire up your favorite IRC client and head over to #opensuse-project.